The effect of the jigsaw excitation is like that of artificial dithering, transforming the Coulomb friction (which behaves like a switch) to a saturation, with gain: ν = 2φ π|θ 2 |ω = 4Lφ 1 3λπω |θ 1 | for small amplitudes of the velocity (slow) oscillation: (21) | θ ˙ 1 | ≪ |θ 2 |ω = 3λ 2L |θ 1|ω (22) We obtained a “viscous” friction, with a coefficient depending on the value of θ 1 . Since the friction term is a nonstatic nonlinearity, we cannot apply Popov’s criterion. However, since the effect of the friction is to reduce the energy of the system, we can say that the stabilizing frequency will be stabilizing also in the presence of friction: however, stability in this case must be seen as convergence to a small zone around the inverted position, whose size depends on the stiction coefficient and ω fast where the pendulum may get “stuck”. 7 Simulation The equations of motion can be easily integrated numerically. Of course, care must be taken in the selection of the numerical integration scheme, since the differential system is stiff (we have two different time scales in the dynamics of the system). Simulations were carried out for different values of the jigsaw frequency. In Figure 4 an example of the angular time history is shown, for w fast = 2500 RPM, while in Figure 5 we have the power spectrum (obtained with an FFT) of the same signal, where we can clearly distinguish the slow and fast frequencies. A number of simulations was carried out for values of ω ranging from 1000 RPM to 3000. For each simulation the slow frequency was determined with a FFT: a plot of ω slow vs. ω fast is shown in Figure 6. As we can see, we have a very good agreement with the theoretical relation between ω fast and ω slow , including the value of ω crit . Unfortunately, the agreement is not very good when experimental data are concerned. This is most probably due to the limited capabilities in the available measuring equipment, which did not allow us to take very precise measurement. An interesting note can be made on the effects of friction on the stability of the system: according to the numerical simulation, the nonlinear system oscillations are slowly diverging in the case of no friction. The addition of a small friction term corrects this divergence, giving the expected stable behavior. Further investigation is needed to assess the origin of the divergence (i.e. to make sure it is not due to numerical errors in the propagation). However the theoretical results give only marginal stability for an approximate model: a slow divergence in the frictionless case is not to be excluded. 6